Flour: Spectacular Recipes from Boston's Flour Bakery + Cafe Review

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(More customer reviews)The book begins with a baking overview of sorts. It gives an explanation of techniques that will be used throughout the book. Then, it goes over baking equipment. Next, the book has a short discussion of ingredients. The section on ingredients offers quite a bit of information on things like the right temperature for the ingredients and reasons why unsalted butter is better than salter butter in the recipes. After that, the book has Joanne's Top 12 Baking Tips with explanations for each tip. The author also has quite a few explanations on the science behind the tip or technique throughout the book.
The book covers breakfast treats, cookies, cakes, pies & tarts, other sweets, and breads. Each chapter has popular treats (i.e. red velvet cake, sticky buns, and chocolate chunk cookies, which are wonderful) and also has more unique recipes, too (i.e. hazelnut-almond dacquoise, lemon marshmallow meringue pie, and rosemary shortbread). There are also recipes to make homemade versions of popular, American treats, such as oreos, pop tarts, and fig newtons.
One downside to this book is that there are few pictures. For example, only about four of the twenty-five recipes in the cookie section have a picture, which is a shame because the pictures in the book are beautiful. One note - the carrot cake recipe calls for baking the cupcakes for 50 minutes, but mine were done after 25 minutes. I'm not sure whether that was a typo or whether I just have a hot oven.
*Update 11/7/10* The chocolate chunk cookies were some of the best chocolate chip cookies that I've ever made. I also really liked the Chunky Lola cookies. The surprise hit so far, though, was the cornmeal lime cookies. They were surprisingly addictive and the perfect end to a Latin-flavored meal.
*Update 12/13/10* I took this cookbook home for the holidays. We made a huge batch of the sticky sticky buns, and they were incredibly rich and so yummy. They taste like a cross between a honey bun and a traditional sticky bun. A couple notes - One, you may want to put a cookie sheet under the rolls as they cook. We had quite a mess to clean up when the goo from one of the rolls bubbled over. Second, baking the rolls in a glass pan seemed to help them cook more evenly than baking them in a metal pan.
*Update 1/27/11* After reading reviews of other cookbooks on here, I felt that I should note that this book has the ingredients listed by weight and by volume (i.e. grams and cups). I know that a lack of weight measurements can be a make or break issue for some people with a cookbook, so I wanted to make it clear that this book does have measurements listed both ways.

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Awakenings Review

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(More customer reviews)I got an advanced reading copy of this book signed by the author at Book Expo America. I was excited to read this new urban fantasy/fantasy by Tor. It was an interesting start to a new series, but it is just that a start. The story pretty much ends right in the middle of things.
The story begins with a number of men with the same last name being hunted down by unnatural evil beings. As things unfold you find that these men came here from another world and were sworn to protect a special child. But these men can't remember anything and the child is missing. A beautiful woman comes to round up the men and remind them that the fate of their kingdom rests on the shoulders of the missing child.
I really enjoyed the beginning of this novel. There were all of these strange and supernatural evil guys hunting down regular joes who had no idea what was going on. The plot gets more interesting as things unfold, then part of the way through the book it kind of stalls out. The main reason for this is that there are just too many viewpoints being covered and it is hard to keep track of them all. You hear from five to six viewpoints throughout and the book isn't that long.
The plot is well-wrought, intricate, and spinning out to epic proportions by the end of the book. The characters were all okay, but not completely engaging. The majority of the characters were somewhat unlikable; they just didn't come off as having a ton of personality and this is probably because of the constant switching of character perspective throughout the book.
This is a strange book because it starts in a modern city and ends in a fantasy-like world; if feels like you are reading an epic fantasy but it is an urban fantasy setting for the majority of the book. There is a ton of political stuff going on in the fantasy world and I had trouble keeping it all straight.
The book ends dead in the middle of the story which is obnoxious because this wasn't advertised as a series. I hate it when books do that.
Overall it was an okay book. It has an interesting world and plot and initially started out as an engaging book. The characters are hard to get into though because the book is constantly switching viewpoint; this made the story kind of choppy and hard to stay involved in as the book went on. This is definitely the beginning of a series since the book pretty much stops right in the middle of everything (I hate this!). Although the book is decently written, I probably won't read more of this series because I just wasn't that engaged with the story or characters by the end of the book.

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